Paraeducators in Art Classrooms: Issues of Culture, Leadership, and Special Needs

Abstract

Using Blumer's (1969) symbolic interaction as a theory base, this research is a multi-site analysis that examines instructional and managerial interaction in segregated, inclusive, and integrated classrooms of art teachers who teach students with disabilities. It describes approaches to art instruction for students with disabilities in the classes of 12 art teachers, each of whom relied on the services of a paraeducator. It lends understanding of how disability is defined and perpetuated by classroom interaction. Paraeducators, well meaning but generally untrained, tended to diminish learning, marginalize, and disempower students. I argue for the need to address classroom leadership and supervisory skills in preservice and inservice teacher education programs and for the learning of best practices to provide opportunities for students with even the most severe disabilities to communicate through visual means their being, their chosen ideas, and their understandings.